In journalism the United Nations report on human rights abuses by China in the Xinjiang province would have been news if the world body had categorically given a clean chit to that communist nation. Instead what the report did was to merely confirm what critics, human rights activists and watchdog groups have been saying for a very long time—that there have been and ongoing gross abuses of particular groups of people like the Uighur muslims and Turkic communities in the name of fighting terrorism and extremism.
The United Nations Report does not mention the word “genocide”, but short of that all its characterisations of what is going on in that province of China amount to crimes against humanity according to persons who are familiar with this aspect of international human rights law and international humanitarian law. It is not merely one of denying the Uighurs the holy book or forbidding them to pray; but in a systematic denial of basic rights in which even women are apparently not spared.
